Category: Geography

Map skills borrow concepts from many different disciplines, including Math, Art, Language and of course Geography. Map skills should be basic to student education early in their journey and then used often to measure distances, calculate routes, preview field trip locations, explore historic sites, and more.

For many of you, I’m not saying anything you don’t already know — but have you tried to personalize a map? Draw a spotlight exactly where you want students to look, or sketch the route to a field trip? With most maps, it’s difficult, time-consuming, and non-intuitive, but Scribble Maps make all of these chores possible and more by letting you first, select the map best suited to your purpose (for example, a topographic one for a hike — under ESRI-Topography), and second, write directly onto the maps with a freehand drawing tool or by typing, add placemarks, draw shapes, calculate distance and area, and add image overlays. You can even add video and audio files. Maps can be saved as images, PDFs, or native files, and shared via email, blogs, a direct link, or embedded into online locations. It’s intuitive, easily learned by doing for students who hate reading directions, and is compatible with desktops, laptops, Chromebooks, iPads, and Android tablets. Because it uses Google Maps as its foundation, it will instantly feel familiar. Plus, it requires no log-in, so no email address for students.

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April 22nd is Earth Day. Celebrate it with your students by letting them visit these websites:

1. Breathing earth– the environment
2. Breathing Earth YouTube Video–of CO2 use, population changes, and more
3. Conservation Game
4. Earth Day—NASA Ocean Currents
5. Earth Day Printables
6. Eco-friendly house
7. Ecotourism Simulation–for grades 4 and above
8. EekoWorld
9. Electrocity
10. Footprint calculator
11. History of Earth Day–lots of reading
12. Home of the Future
13. My Garbology
14. NASA City

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April 22nd is Earth Day. Celebrate it with your students by letting them visit these websites:

1. Breathing Earth
2. Breathing Earth YouTube Video–of CO2 use, population changes, and more
3. Conservation Game
4. Earth day collection
5. Earth Day—NASA Ocean Currents
6. Eco-friendly house
7. Eeko World
8. Ecotourism Simulation–for grades 4 and above
9. Electrocity
10. Footprint calculator
11. Home of the Future
12. My Garbology
13. NASA City

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Students find their country of origin on Google Earth and grab a screen shot of it. Save to their computer. Import it into a drawing program like KidPix and add the country flag and student name. Students learn about importing data from one program to another with this project.

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Here’s an authentic use of technology to support discussion on math, language standards, and the holidays. As a summation to your discussion with students on symbols, idiomatic expressions, geography, farms, or another topic, post this on your Smartscreen. The poll includes lots of definitions for the word ‘turkey’–from objective to idiomatic. Have each student come up some time during the day (or class) and make their choice.

[polldaddy poll=7398424]

Did your students come up with other definitions I didn’t list?

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Kids love field trips. They’re out of the classroom, get to travel by bus with lots of kids and not enough adults. What’s not to like?

A few items come to mind: Cost, staffing, potential for disaster. And that’s just off the top of my head. There’s a way to provide the field trip experience with few of the risks, no cost, and a fraction of the time away from what is likely an overstuffed education day:

Virtual Field Trips, via the internet.

There are so many options  for real-time webcams, conversations with experts (via Skype and Google Hangout), and the opportunity to visit locations that are otherwise inaccessible that classes have embraced this new approach to seeing the world. This enthusiasm has encouraged a cottage industry that often is far from the exciting, realistic experience teachers want for their students. When I search the internet, it seems any site with a camcorder and multimedia resources calls itself a ‘virtual field trip’. Truthfully, many of them are a waste of time. Sure, I like the pictures and the movies, but I don’t feel like I’m there, immersed in history or geography, with a life-changing experience that will live in my memory for decades to come.

Intellectually, I know there are good ones out there. Finally, after wearing through my favorite virtual shoes, I have a list to recommend. These next nine virtual field trips cover topics from geology to history to the human experience. See what you think:

360 Cities

What’s not to love about a website that starts:

Welcome to Earth! It’s a planet having an iron core, with two-thirds of its surface covered by water. Earth orbits a local star called the Sun, the light of which generates the food supply for all the millions of species of life on earth. The dominant species on Earth is the human being, and you’re one of the six billion of them! Humans have iron in their blood, and their bodies are composed of two-thirds water, just like the planet they live on.

Enjoy your stay, and try to stay calm.

360 Cities contains the Internet’s largest collection of uploaded panoramic images. Let’s pause here for a moment. Panos–those wide pictures that cover up to 180 degrees left and right. Right?

360 Cities does panos differently. Let me show you. Here’s one from my iPad:

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April 22nd is Earth Day. Celebrate it with your students by letting them visit these six websites:

1. Breathing Earth
2. Breathing Earth YouTube Video–of CO2 use, population changes, and more
3. Conservation Game
4. Eco-friendly house
5. Eeko World
6. Ecotourism Simulation–for grades 4 and above
7. Electrocity
8. Eyes on the Earth–from NASA
9. Footprint calculator (more…)

If you’re studying geography in your classroom, you won’t want to miss these 149 great websites. I have them divided as:

• General
• Biomes
• California regions (only because that’s where my teaching centers)
• Global
• Natural Disasters
• Survival in the…
  • Jungle
  • Desert
  • Mountains
  • Prairie
  • Ocean
  • General survival websites
• Virtual tours (some great sites here)

Enjoy!

BTW–Click here for updates to list.

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As a working technology teacher, I get hundreds of questions from parents about their home computers, how to do stuff, how to solve problems. Each Tuesday, I’ll share one of those with you. They’re always brief and always focused. Enjoy!

Q: I can’t find enough detail about a particular area of the world that we’re studying in class. Any suggestions?

A: That’s a lot easier to do today than it used to be, thanks to Google Street View. Students love walking down the street that they just read about in a book or seeing their home on the internet. It’s also a valuable research tool for writing. What better way to add details to a setting than to go see it?
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Introduce students to web-based geography activities that can be done in five or ten minutes between lessons, before lunch, in free time. I include five in this lesson.

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